It was time to get the PV544 (from 1961) repainted. It has been sitting for more than 20 years in storage without any maintenance. The paint was so dull and I couldn't get it to shine again. So I invited some paint shops to make an offer.

Now, the car is under treatment. The job started in august 2016 and will take several months to complete. I will get this post updated every now and then.

Most of the body, mud guards, doors, hood etc. have the paint be removed and a primer sprayed on.

After a very long wait of about 8 months I finally got my Vampire V2 for the Amiga 600. I wanted to test this beast immediately and put it in one of my A600's. In the first A600 the board wouldn't stay solid on the processor of the A600 and because of that the Vampire only wanted to run when pressing it with my thumb on the CPU. I also detected a flaw in the A600 that I have to inspect later.

I decided to try it on a second A600 and there the board popped on the CPU and stayed rocksolid. I used the screws of V1 to keep it there. My first impression is that it does not feel as a great improvement from V1 of the Vampire. Figures tell me it is a lot faster though. And it has nice extras: microSD slot (which works but the driver is very buggy at the moment), HDMI port (works good but you have to manage the cable and connector in the cramped A600 case) and 128MB RAM.A flaw of the board is also that it won't cold boot with a network adapter in the PCMCIA-port. I have to pull it out, boot, use CardPatch and reboot to get the adapter going. V1 of the board has this problem too.

But all in all: a very nice accelerator for the Amiga 600! More to come for the A500/A2000 and A1200. Thanks to the Vampire and Apollo team!

Some guy from Germany sells this s-video adapter for the VIC-20. It's purpose is to improve the picture quality of red, cyan, green, yellow and purple colors.

I installed it on the second VIC-20 I've got. The first one doesn't have the VIC1 socketed. It worked OK but The picture wasn't much of an improvement. Maybe that's because of the Revision C of the motherboard (assy 324003). The VIC1 chip isn't in a RF shield but just sitting on the motherboard.

Comparing both VIC's I noticed that the second VIC-20 I've got has not only the two-prong PSU connector, but also the squair characters ont he keyboard keys:Didn't notice this before and I like it! It seemed to me the case was never opened, although very yellow.

Last two months we have been travelling through Spain and Portugal. We had a good time despite of the weather being not always nice.We had some difficulties with the van but managed to get home without delay.A short report of this trip can be found here. (Dutch only).